The biological origins of meditation in humans remain underexplored, despite extensive scholarship on its cultural history and health effects. We present a theoretical account that traces the origins of meditation to the evolutionarily conserved repertoire of defensive freezing. We propose that this ancient survival response-characterized by motoric immobility, heightened vigilance with narrowed attentional focus, and bradycardia-provided a behavioral, neural, and physiological substrate upon which operant and social reinforcement could act. Over evolutionary time, these response components may have been co-opted and selectively reinforced within early human social communities, giving rise to complex, structured behavioral repertoires resembling modern sitting and slow-movement meditative practices embedded within various cultural systems of teaching. Rather than viewing meditation as a human psychological innovation, we suggest it represents a culturally refined expression of an ancestral survival strategy, maintained and elaborated through reinforcement, mimicry, and verbal instruction, spanning the late Paleolithic era (approximately 150,000-200,000 years before present) to the present day. This framework recasts meditation as an evolved modulation of a more basic stress- and threat-related freezing response template, shaped and maintained through social reinforcement.
Black et al. (2026) studied this question.